This project seeks to reconstruct the Jewish population of Prague in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In the public tree on Geni, it is possible to link up all of the major Prague families. You can find a list of Prague Jewish surnames from Alexander Beider's work.

You will notice that many of them are rather uncommon today, but very distinctive for Prague, such as the possessive patro- and matronymics, the ones that end in -eles, like Abeles, Duschenes, Fleckeles, Jeiteles, Karpeles, Pascheles, Pereles, Schefteles, Schifferes, Sekeles, Taubeles, Wedeles, Zodekes.

What you find if you look at the Prague 1794 census is that these were mostly not very large families, maybe 5-10 separate families with the same last name, and so presumably closely related (siblings, cousins, uncles).

When you look at the Prague conscription database or the Census of the Prague Population you see many of the children from the 1794 census listed as adults with their families. The problem is matching them up because names are often repeated. Especially female names were quite restricted at that time, so half of the girls in 1794 seem to be named Sara, Judith or Rebeka. But even if a direct match cannot be found, it is possible on geni to enter in the families as relatives until the right link is discovered. For example, I entered in members of the Zeltmacher family. In the 1794 census there are basically three families, perhaps brothers, Juda, Dawid and Moises. Both Dawid and Moises have boys named Joachim. In the Prague conscription database we find the two Joachims, born 1776 and 1789, and can trace their families down several generations in that database. But we cannot tell which one is which. I set up hypothetical brothers of Dawid and Moises, named "?", and place these identified Joachims under them until we can tell which one goes where. That way the whole family is visible to anyone looking at the tree, even though it is not yet clear how all the pieces fit together. We know that they are pieces of the same puzzle! Once we have the Familianten records available, we will be able to sort this out and correct the tree.

Death notices from the Prager Tagblatt are now indexed and available from GenTeam. These notices often provide names of spouses, children and their spouses (with maiden names), siblings and their spouses (with maiden names), and grandchildren, making them a real goldmine of information.

My hope is that we will get access to the data that will allow us to reconstruct centuries of Jewish family history in Prague. Because Prague Jews used surnames before Jews from the outlying communities, we can sometimes trace back several centuries. Using the cemetery data, census data, conscriptions, Familianten, vital records, obituaries, and Holocaust databases, it should ultimately be possible to trace 400 years of history for some families, from the time of the Maharal up to the Holocaust.